Ibn Khaldun by Syed Farid Alatas, and: Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology by Syed Farid Alatas (review)

Many authors have written about Ibn Khaldun, but no one, to my knowledge, has written two books about him that encompass both biography and sociology. Syed Farid Alatas, who teaches at National University of Singapore where he also chairs the Department of Malay Studies, is already well known for his several articles, essays, and interventions on Ibn Khaldun. Now he has published a fresh biography of the Maghribi polymath as well as an extensive review of his legacy as a sociologist. Both books are exceptional for their scope and clarity, marking a new register in Islamic intellectual history.

The first book, published in the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies series, “Makers of Islamic Civilization,” provides the familiar three-stage sequence of Ibn Khaldun’s life. It is reiterated from his own autobiography: his youth and training (20 years) is followed by his political and family life (23 years), which then culminates in his judicial and scholarly pursuits (31 years). The last is marred by the loss of his family in a tragic shipwreck and crowned by his meeting with Tamerlane near Damascus in 1401. More than a mere recapitulation of Ibn Khaldun’s life and work, Alatas’ profile probes the sources of Ibn Khaldun’s distinctive approach to society. He examines why this Maghribi jurist founded a new science, with its principal focus neither rhetoric nor politics but human organization or human society. Its frame exceeded Islam and Muslim civilization, extending to the plane of world history and encompassing all past and present dynasties that define what Ibn Khaldun calls al-ma‘mura fi al-ard, or the inhabited part of the earth. It was to be a science at once empirical and materialist. It would embody a new methodology, one described by Marshall Hodgson as producing

a new self-consistent body of demonstrable generalizations about historical change, generalizations which would in turn be based on premises taken from the demonstrated results of ‘higher’, i.e., more abstract, sciences — in this case chiefly biology, psychology and geography (quoted p. 74).

While much of the narrative, as also the sources, themes and analyses of Ibn Khaldun, will be familiar to scholars or students of premodern Islamicate civilization, no one will have read about the Khaldunian approach as it is applied to the history of the Jews, especially during the time of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. Alatas carefully reviews the evidence and arguments from Barakat Ahmad’s Muhammad and the Jews (1978), and then applies the rule of probability — that is, how likely or unlikely is it that such-and-such happened — to this crucial period and this delicate issue. The results are commonsensical but they pour cold water on the conventional account and have since led to revisionist estimates (see for example, G.D. Newby’s 1988 A History of the Jews of Arabia.

The second book, Applying Ibn Khaldun, moves beyond case examples such as the above, and surveys how major aspects of global history look different from a Khaldunian perspective. How do we rethink state formation with reference to the notion of solidarity and loyalty connoted by the key term ‘asabiyya? To the extent that it includes not just blood ties but also clientelism and alliances, how do various dynasties and ruling groups project authority and maintain power through their manipulation of ‘asabiyya, or conversely lose power through their failure to do so? Alatas charts how most historians have overlooked Khaldunian postulates in thinking about patterns of social, as also political and economic, change. He notes, for instance, how apparent it seems that “the consolidation of ‘asabiyyah among the Turkic tribes formed the military force behind the rise of the Ottoman state” (p. 73), but he also considers how the success of the Ottoman state was dependent...